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18

Jul

Walking in the shoes of the CIO

Jucy and Sleepyhead CIOs share their insights on real world challenges.

“We’re a business driven IT team,” is how Tristin King, Head of Tech at Jucy, describes his team. Those words, and that title, say a lot about the modernisation of the IT function in most organisations.

It was a busy couple of days in Auckland talking with clients and prospects on the Intergen stand at New Zealand’s biggest tech trade show, the CIO Summit. In between plenary sessions, roundtables and seminars, our friends at iStart interviewed King, along with the CTO at The Comfort Group, Richard Horton.

They both told iStart’s Hayden McCall that running their operations in a cloud environment has enabled them to envision a new future.

“We’re putting all our eggs in one basket and saying yes we can run our whole business on someone else’s infrastructure,” King says, explaining Jucy’s project to migrate five separate booking systems onto one core, cloud-based platform. As a relatively young 16 year old, the company has grown up in a digital world, and that brings some advantages over others.

In contrast, Horton’s company, The Comfort Group – counting Dunlop Foams, Sleepmaker and Sleepyhead among its brands, is an 80+ year old manufacturing and distribution business with 1,200 staff working in plants across Australasia. Its ERP systems are as embedded as the tooling on the automated manufacturing plants they help run.

“We have our own private cloud. We have just about complete virtualisation across the stack, we have very good failover, we’ve got redundancy in all of the layers of the infrastructure,” Horton told us.

And all of those good things were enabled by having the right cloud technologies in place.

So what does that future look like now?

For King, that future is all about the customer journey. “With a robust core system as the hub, we can use spokes – we can attach little additions to that system – [and be] a lot more innovative, a lot more cutting edge.”

Horton is focused on embedding the disciplines of managing cloud systems into his team.

“There’s a lot more to it than just lift and shift,” he cautions.

It’s that type of agile vision that was the ambition of most CIOs at the Summit – in a business world that is hungry to experience the gains that using technology can bring.

You can read more about Jucy’s journey here and other Intergen client stories here.